Can You Sell Out Your Event in Less Than 2 Minutes?

This post is a case study of Brooklyn Beta a conference that managed to sell out in less than 2 minutes. This post has been written by Julius Solaris for Event Manager Blog (?).

I was hanging out on Twitter over the weekend and I could not help but noticing a Tweet by Alex Cone:

Fair enough, but then I saw:

‘Interesting’ – I thought.

Let’s Investigate

I was immediately captured by the keywords ‘sold out’. As your event war correspondent, I am always on the lookout for such keywords.

I decided to dig deeper.

I landed on Brooklyn Beta’s website.

Oh la la. Now this is a different kind of website.

Almost too extreme, even for my standards. It is basically a sign up form. No speakers, no details.

Despite my initial reluctance – that happens a lot when I face smart@%$ projects – I decided to keep looking for details.

A Bit of History

Brooklyn Beta happened for the first time in 2010. You can find here the original website.

It was started by Chris Shifflet and a bunch of friends/colleagues with not necessarily a structured plan and not without risk.

The event spread on Twitter among web designers and creatives. It turned out to be a fantastic success, as you can read in the Write-Ups (btw Lanyrd, what an amazing service!).

Ticket Sale

The Eventbrite page is now private but I managed to follow the release of tickets through. And found astonishing details.

The information that follows may be imprecise, it is in fact a deduction. A damn accurate one, but still a deduction. Unfortunately despite asking Chris to shed light, I have received no official answer. UPDATE: Chris replied with accurate data!

The day I saw the tweet it was the first round of tickets. I counted 175 registered attendees.

What’s so special about that? – You may ask. Patience, dear reader, patience.

If you ever followed events in the tech scene you will know there is a fierce competition to get tickets. This happens a lot with BarCamps. Usually these events are free to attend and such competition, despite being a great cultural factor, has no commercial value.

The difference in this case is that, during day one, tickets were sold for US$100. This may not be a lot to some of you, but I ensure you it is in the high end for ‘contaminated concepts‘.

Round two was not so different, with tickets selling out in less than a minute. I would assume they put up another 175 tickets, for a grand total of 350 ticketsUPDATE: 200 sold in less than 2 minutes.

Some users immediately started to make excellent comparisons:

[For those of you who may not know, Glastonbury Festival is a popular music event in the UK that in 2011 sold 137,000 tickets in less than 4 hours.]

Wait, there’s more…

Clearly lots of people were disappointed by not getting a ticket. To the extent they started a parallel event called Brewklyn Beta:

The news in this case is that the organizers of both events are working together to make everyone happy, thus really re-shaping the offer of the initial event:

What Can We Learn?

- Events born online or within an existing community have stronger selling potential.

- Spontaneous events are becoming commercially valuable initiatives that should scare the hell out of traditional establishment.

- Event attendees are shaping the offer of events and organizers should be ready to accommodate user generated initiatives.

How awesome is that for a Monday?

Julius Solaris is the editor of the Event Manager Blog, learn more about him on JuliusSolaris.com or send him an email.

Follow @tojulius